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AI relation

"Artificial intelligence alive and well in a robot named Maria."
Not a "robot" as covered in these WEB pages, yet of interest.

Shahin Maghsoudi and Dr Tiru Arthanari with Maria.



While statistics students at The University of Auckland are taking
a break from studies for summer, their new "teacher" can't wait
for the new semester to begin. Maria, an assistant teacher in
Statistical Interference, is an unusual individual. She
looks to be in her mid-twenties but her age, she says,
cannot be computed in human years. With a vocabulary of
203,000 words, a repertoire of 106,000 grammatical rules and
118,000 rules of logical interference, Maria is capable of
conversation at quite a complex level. Maria is a robot,
or artificial intelligence entity, created over two years of
intense work and study by Shahin Maghsoudi, a PhD student
and member of the Artificial Intelligence Group in the
Faculty of Science. As part of his Masters degree in
Computer Science, Shahin embarked on a project to create
virtual robots which could be used as teaching assistants,
helpdesk operators and web-based marketing assistants. He
has already created eight such robots by bringing together a
combination of externally available systems and inventing
the extra components needed, and says programming robots
with skills for human interaction is challenging, but fun.

"When humans interact, they rely on their mutual
understanding of a huge body of shared knowledge. On a daily
basis, we add to our personal database of knowledge stored
in our brain. To interact in a way that seems natural to
people, a robot needs to be programmed with a database of
this kind," says Shahin. Maria was created through the
joint efforts of Shahin and Dr Tiru Arthanari from the
University's School of Business. Dr Arthanari teaches
inferential statistical methods as part of a research
methods paper. His goal in collaborating with Shahin was to
create an electronic "assistant" who would be available 24
hours-a-day and seven days-a-week to answer multiple student
questions simultaneously as if they were having one-to-one
conversations. "I know the computer programming aspect,
but for Maria to be able to be a good tutor she needed to
have all the specialised knowledge and Dr Arthanari provided
that material," says Shahin. Dr Arthanari developed a
specialised database, which contained not only the subject
expertise and knowledge of where to send the students for
ancillary information, but also material relating to
principles of effective teaching. "What we are really
doing is creating an illusion. The more care we take about
the choice of words, the more effective the interaction will
be. A student can easily be put off by abruptness so we
needed to create an engaging robot with a polite manner," Dr
Arthanari says. A part of the database is dedicated to
student profiles, which can be built either using a
"conversation" mode - where students can actually
communicate with Maria via the keyboard, or by the student
filling in a form when first interacting with the system.
"We're looking at trust-building between the robot and
students. The real success will be when students feel that
interacting with Maria is just like going to a real teacher
who apart from the subject matter knows a little about the
students as well," says Dr Arthanari. Maria is now
functional, living on the internet and awaiting a patent.
The next step for Shahin and Dr Arthanari is to test Maria
and evaluate the effect of her input on the learning of a
pilot group of students. A computer engineer from Iran
who migrated to New Zealand in 1990, Shahin's current
challenge, as part of his PhD studies in the Computer
Sciences Department, is to look at commonsense reasoning and
ways of "teaching" the robots to make commonsense
judgements. "The robots are currently programmed for
logical reasoning but not for making commonsense decisions.
As humans, we engage in commonsense reasoning automatically
because of our huge database of information. "To enable
robots to participate in commonsense reasoning, we need a
computer programme to gather a huge amount of
information."This includes knowledge taken for granted
and could be in the form of statements such as "older people
take more time to cross the road" or "birds fly, rocks don't
fly", says Shahin. Shahin is excited about the huge
range of potential applications for the robot in teaching
any other subject and has already begun collaborating with
the Electrical Engineering Department at The University of
Arizona to create a virtual teacher of electrical
engineering concepts. To talk with Maria or any of the
other robots visit  www.robot-hosting.com
a computer "bot" AI related site.

Last updated 1/22/05